Every year, CREtech brings together the executives actually running the largest real estate platforms in the country. Not to repeat talking points, but to say what they are genuinely seeing in their businesses. In October 2025, our C-suite panel on the state of the commercial real estate marketplace delivered exactly that. Here is what five leaders said on stage, and why each of those conversations is more relevant today than when they said it.
Cathy Marcus, Co-Head and Global COO, PGIM Real Estate: The Market Has Repriced. Capital Has Not Followed. Yet.
At CREtech, Marcus opened the market discussion with an observation that cut through a lot of noise. Prices across global real estate markets stabilized around mid-2024, credit is widely available, and transaction activity at PGIM is running at roughly double the pace of a year prior. And yet institutional capital has not returned the way every prior cycle would have predicted. "This is the strangest period I have ever experienced," she said, drawing on nearly four decades in the business starting from the savings and loan crisis.
She traced the hesitation partly to geopolitical sensitivity. After feeling optimistic entering 2025, the tariff situation put the freeze back on. Her current read: optimism for 2026, with a candid acknowledgment that she has made that same prediction before and been wrong.
On AI, Marcus was equally unvarnished. She welcomed the moderator's statistic that only 1 percent of organizations have seen bottom-line impact from AI investment, pushing back directly on the hype. She described PGIM's AI work in three categories: property operations, investment management efficiency, and eventually better investment decisions. The third will be last to be solved. Her benchmark for real impact is conviction, specifically the ability to identify the next Nashville before it becomes Nashville.
Why it matters now: Institutional allocators remain cautious entering mid-2026 even as fundamentals tighten across sectors. Marcus's framing, that the market has done its part and capital is the lagging variable, is the conversation happening in every allocator meeting right now.
Petherbridge runs 500 million square feet of industrial real estate serving 8,000 customers, roughly 5 percent of the U.S. economy flowing through Link's portfolio. At CREtech, he reported that Link leased more space year-to-date than the prior year despite tariffs, global volatility, and rate uncertainty. His explanation: collapsing new supply combined with continued e-commerce growth and the reindustrialization of America create a tailwind that uncertainty cannot fully offset.
On technology, Petherbridge drew a distinction that anchored the AI conversation for the whole panel. He separates size from scale. "Size can be acquired," he said. "Scale is connecting the dots." Link has built its own customer portal, an internal GPT that lets every employee query the company's full data set by typing a plain question, and a proprietary data set years in the making. He organizes AI into three buckets: repetitive process automation such as lease abstraction and coding tools, cognitive engagement with customers and internal teams, and cognitive insights where models begin to identify where to build next and what specifications will matter. The first two are worth sharing across the industry. The third is where competitive advantage lives.
Why it matters now: Industrial supply is at multi-year lows nationally while demand from data center buildout and reshoring announcements continues to accelerate. Petherbridge's argument about proprietary data compounding over time is the playbook for anyone building for the next decade.
Stephen Yalof, President and CEO, Tanger: Retail Is an Acquisition Market and AI Is Already on the Leasing Team
Yalof brought the most concrete AI example of the session. The day Tanger closed on a new acquisition in Kansas City, he opened ChatGPT and asked it to generate a list of retailers typically found in a Tanger center that did not yet exist in that market. He had 25 targets within minutes. Work that previously took his leasing team two weeks. "It is going to make my leasing team that much smarter and that much more efficient," he said.
His broader market view: with department store closures shrinking available quality retail square footage and new development economically unfeasible, Tanger is in full acquisition mode, buying centers at 40 cents on replacement cost in some cases. Outlet retail benefits specifically from uncertainty because excess full-price inventory flows into the channel, giving brands a margin-preserving way to move product without diluting their brand positioning.
Why it matters now: Retail availability at quality centers continues to tighten nationally. The brands Yalof named as in high demand from shoppers, Vuori, Athleta, Lululemon and athletic fitness broadly, are exactly the categories driving foot traffic and lease interest across experiential retail right now.
Bozzuto manages approximately 130,000 apartments through a fully vertically integrated platform spanning development, construction, and management. At CREtech, he described multifamily turning from a resident market to a landlord market as COVID-era supply burns off. Some markets including Miami, Atlanta, and Nashville still carry overhang, but the broader trend is moving toward supply constraint. New development remains effectively on hold because the returns do not justify the risk at current costs, which means the pipeline behind current supply is nearly empty.
His response to the AI and human labor question was the most philosophical of the panel. He argued that the real competitive advantage in an increasingly automated world is not replacing human interaction but deepening it. "Creating joy, lighting people up, finding that human connection, I think that is where you can do extremely well," he said. Technology earns its place by reducing friction so that human moments can be higher quality, not by eliminating them. He described vertical integration as a wide root system that allows a business to flex through cycles rather than fracture.
Why it matters now: Multifamily fundamentals are improving faster than most forecasts entering 2026. The divergence between Class A properties with strong experiential programming and commodity product is widening on both occupancy and rent growth, exactly the dynamic Bozzuto described.
Holm spoke last on the panel and echoed the themes that had built throughout the session, specifically the compounding value of internal proprietary data and the conviction that comes from investing across asset classes simultaneously. When activity picks up in one sector, Ares uses it to infer what comes next in adjacent sectors. That cross-asset visibility has driven deployment to levels on track to surpass 2021 and 2022, the prior peak years.
Note: the session transcript cuts off before Holm's full remarks conclude. His complete comments will be featured once the full recording is available.
Why it matters now: When firms with cross-sector flexibility are actively deploying at record pace, it is one of the clearest signals that institutional conviction in the cycle has genuinely shifted.
These are not prepared remarks. These are operating executives describing what is happening in their portfolios right now, what is working in AI and what is not, where they are deploying capital and why, and what they think comes next. The gap between what gets reported in trade press and what gets said candidly on a CREtech stage is exactly why this community exists.
The conversations from this session are already playing out in real time across the market. If you want to be in the room when they happen next, join us at the next CREtech event this October 20-21 in NYC.